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A Resource Theory Of The Criminal Law: Exploring When It Matters, Richard O. Lempert

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This paper might look very different had I been asked a sensible question. Instead, I was told that the focus of the program for which this paper was originally prepared was "Does law matter?" and that my particular assignment was to discuss the question of whether the criminal law mattered. Of course criminal law matters. One hardly need be a committed functionalist to conclude from the dense net of criminal laws that envelop modern societies that criminal law must matter or else we would not have so much of it or, conversely, because we have so much of it, it …